The Empire of Gold

by S. A. Chakraborty

  “We can’t stay here. We can’t—” Ali repeated when Nahri turned away, hating the pity in his eyes. “I’m sorry. I wish we could, but Manizheh is going to come for the seal. You know it. I know it. It’s only a matter of time.”

  “We don’t know it,” Nahri countered fiercely. “For all we know, she thinks we drowned in the lake. And even if she has magic, so what? Will she search the whole world?”

  “She doesn’t need to search the whole world.” Ali hesitated. “You didn’t hide your love for your human home. Surely if asked, Darayavahoush would—”

  “Dara doesn’t know anything about me.”

  A tense silence followed that. Ali paced away, linking his hands behind his head, but Nahri didn’t budge from her spot on the roof. If she could have, she would have rooted herself there.

  Breathing hard, she fought for control of her churning emotions. Nahri had always done best when she was cold. Pragmatic. “Maybe it won’t be forever,” she said, trying to find a compromise. “If magic comes back, wonderful. We’ll consider going to Ta Ntry then. But if it doesn’t? We have a backup plan, a safe life here.”

  “We will never be safe here and neither will anyone around us.” Ali tapped the mark on his brow. “Not with this. For all we know, she’ll send the ifrit after us. After Yaqub. And I don’t want to be safe. Not if my people aren’t. Not if my sister isn’t.”

  “Then what? We go to Ta Ntry and build an army so we can fight in another pointless war?” She threw up her hands. “Ali, they turned the lake into a beast and designed a plague capable of killing thousands of djinn in a single night. She’s allied with the ifrit. There’s nothing she won’t do to win.”

  “Then we’ll find a way to fight back!”

  “Like you fought back?” Ali spun at the challenge in her voice, but Nahri pressed on. She needed to make him see. “How many Daevas did you kill that night?”

  A hint of anger blossomed in his face. “The Daevas I killed were soldiers. Soldiers who invaded my home, killed my friends, and meant to slaughter my entire tribe.”

  Nahri gave him an even look. “Change ‘Daevas’ to ‘djinn,’ and I bet that’s just what Dara said to himself.”

  Ali stepped back like she’d slapped him. “I am nothing like him. I would take a blade to my throat before I’d do the things he’s done.” He blinked, hurt replacing the anger in his eyes. “He killed my brother. How could you say such a thing to me?”

  “Because I don’t want that for you!” Nahri exploded. “I don’t want that for me! You looked like him that night on the palace roof and I …” A sick feeling rose in her. “I helped you. I helped you kill three Daevas. And when I cut into your father’s chest, Ali? It felt good. I felt satisfied.”

  Shaking, Ali turned away again, crossing the roof as if to put space between them.

  She followed, growing more frantic. “But don’t you see? We don’t have to go to war. Let them think we drowned. You and I, we tried, okay? We tried more than most. We built the hospital, and look what happened. The Daevas attacked the shafit, the shafit attacked the Daevas, and your father was ready to start slaughtering people before my mother killed him. Daevabad is a death trap. It corrupts and ruins everyone who tries to fix it. And we could be free of it. Both of us. We could have a life here together. A good one.”

  Ali stopped at the roof’s edge, breathing hard. And then Nahri saw it, a flicker of longing in his face. She knew that longing. She was used to spotting it in others and then closing in, using the desire her mark was too foolish to conceal. A half dozen responses hovered at her lips, ways to convince him to stay, to force him to agree.

  But Ali wasn’t supposed to be a mark anymore; he was supposed to be her friend.

  He turned back around, the ache gone from his expression. No, not just gone—Ali was focused on her like he was about to read a mark himself, and Nahri didn’t like it one bit.

  “I need to say something no Qahtani has a right to tell you, but it needs to be said and there’s no one else,” he began. “Even if Manizheh doesn’t hunt us, even if we don’t get our magic back, we can’t stay here. We have a duty to go back, no matter the consequences. Our families caused this mess, but they’re not the only ones who are going to pay. There are tens of thousands of innocent civilians who are going to pay. And you and I don’t get to look away from that, no matter how tempting.”

  Nahri could have punched him in the face. “You’re correct, you don’t have the right to say that to me. Tempting? So I’m selfish for not wanting to die in Daevabad when I could help people here?”

  “I didn’t say you were selfish—”

  “You might as well have.” Fury rose in her, at herself as well as at Ali. Why was Nahri wasting air trying to convince some stubborn djinn prince to stay at her side?

  Because you want him to stay at your side. Because Nahri didn’t want to be a lonely, selfless doctor in the human world. She wanted to drink bad tea and browse books with someone who knew her. She wanted a life, a friend.

  Nahri didn’t need Ali. She wanted him.

  And that made him a weakness. Nahri could hear the word in Nisreen’s voice, in Ghassan’s voice, in Manizheh’s. That’s what Ali was, what all of them were—the whole of Daevabad. She should have continued to live the way she had in Egypt. No attachments, no dreaming of a hospital or a better future. Just survival.

  The sky abruptly darkened, the sun sinking behind the Pyramids. The murmur of river traffic and the bustling city pulled at her soul. It all suddenly felt so fragile that she wanted to clutch Cairo to her chest and never let it go.

  “Forget it,” she declared. “I’m not going to waste my breath trying to save you from yourself again. You want to go die in Daevabad? Fine. But you’ll be doing it alone.”

  Nahri turned away, meaning to leave him on the roof, but he was already pursuing her.

  “Nahri, she’s going to come for the seal.”

  She glanced back. It was a mistake. Because the beseeching look in Ali’s eyes tugged on a part of her heart Nahri wanted to crush out.

  So she crushed him instead. “Then I’m glad I gave it to you.”

  NAHRI SHOOK WITH ANGER AS SHE STORMED AWAY from the khanqah. To hell with Alizayd al Qahtani and his idealism. To hell with Daevabad, the doomed, poisoned city she’d tried to help. The Grand Temple had enough shrines to Nahids who’d martyred themselves. Nahri wasn’t planning on joining them.

  She didn’t go back to the apothecary. Let Ali go back first, collect his things, and take off on his ludicrous Nile adventure. Maybe when he was starving and lost on some backwater stream, he’d realize he should have listened to her.

  Instead, she walked. Not along the riverbank, but deeper into Cairo itself, through the crowded streets that led toward the hills and past neighborhoods of new migrants. Nahri didn’t want the quiet peace of the flooded Nile, one that invited contemplation. She wanted distraction, noisy human life and activities: children playing and neighbors gossiping. The normal life she should have been living for the last half decade instead of getting pulled into the deadly politics of a bunch of vengeful, warring djinn. She walked without paying attention to where her feet took her, part of her hoping she’d get so lost that by the time she made it back to Yaqub’s, Ali would be gone, and she’d be free of her last tie to the magical world.

  Yet, despite her desire to wrench it all away, Nahri was not surprised when she ended up in the neighborhood where it had all begun.

  The empty lot where she’d performed the zar was eerily untouched, though the neighborhood had grown busier, extra floors built on the surrounding tenements and huts constructed against the walls. Yaqub had said that people were hopeful things were changing in Egypt. The French occupation had been defeated, and their new foreign ruler was promising reforms. More people were moving to the city, looking for opportunities.

  She wanted to tell them not to. It hurt worse to see your dreams destroyed than to never have them at all.

  It d
idn’t seem anyone had dared hope for this lot, however. The plain square of dust was filled with rubbish, an orange cat cleaning its whiskers the only occupant.

  Not for the first time, she thought of Baseema. Had they removed Dara’s arrow from her throat before bringing the girl’s body to her grieving mother, the mother who’d kissed Nahri’s cheeks and blessed her the night before? Had Baseema’s fingers started to char from the ifrit’s possession, her final moments spent in agony all because Nahri had, on an utter whim, decided to sing in Divasti?

  You’re as responsible for that girl’s death as Dara and Vizaresh. It had been unspeakably arrogant of Nahri to dabble in traditions she hadn’t understood, twisting abilities that were meant to heal into a way to deceive innocent people.

  The sky was darkening, maghrib prayer already called. Nahri probably should have been concerned, a young woman alone, but strangely enough, though her magic was gone, she felt little fear from the humans around her. Her time in Daevabad had changed her, setting her apart from the people she once considered her own.

  They’ll be my own again. The future she’d always wanted was finally in her hands, and Nahri wasn’t going to lose it.

  But that night tugged at her like a string, bringing her to El Arafa once again, the vast cemetery looking just as Nahri remembered it, the jumble of tombs and mausoleums an eerie landscape of the dead she knew didn’t always slumber peacefully. She made her way inside, following the meandering alleys of her memory, and sat upon a crumbling stone pillar, half-bathed in moonlight.

  And then—and only then, in the place where he’d arrived in a storm of sand and fire—did Nahri finally and fully let Dara back into her thoughts.

  You weren’t supposed to see it. You were supposed to be safe. Nahri pressed her hands against her temples, remembering the anguish on his handsome face as he stammered those words, his bright eyes begging for understanding.

  How could you do that, Dara? How could you have done any of this?

  For Nahri could no longer deny that Dara was guilty of the whispered crimes that clung to his name. He’d carried out the slaughter of innocent shafit at Qui-zi, a crime so brutal it still scarred their world. He’d then done something equally heinous: knowingly abetting her mother in the attempted annihilation of Daevabad’s Geziri population.

  And she’d fallen for him. No, she had loved him; she might as well admit it to herself. Maybe it had been the rush of adventure and sweeping excitement, the almost embarrassingly inevitable and clearly doomed romance that resulted between dashing warriors and wide-eyed young women. Had Muntadhir not accused her of living in a fairy tale, unable to tell the difference between its hero and its monster? Nahri, who always read her mark, who’d called out a djinn king. How had she not seen the darkness lurking in Dara?

  Because you were the mark, she thought bitterly. And you think to go back to Daevabad, to proclaim yourself a leader capable of outwitting Manizheh? Her mother had taken one look at Nahri and seen straight through to her weaknesses. Her shafit heritage and her stupid fondness for an idiot prince. The darker resentments about being crushed by the djinn. The twinge of pleasure when she’d burned Ghassan’s heart.

  Maybe that was how it started. Nahri wondered what might have happened if the invasion had gone according to Manizheh’s plan. If she’d been kept safe and in the dark by Nisreen and then woken to a world in which Ghassan was dead, the Daevas were free, and Nahri was reunited with her family and the man she loved. Might it have been easier to believe whatever lies they spun to justify it? To quietly choose to look ahead instead of at the bodies and blood propping up their new world?

  Did Dara do that? Nahri tried to imagine him as a young man, as someone brimming with adoration for the Nahids and committed to protecting his people—someone who could have been convinced the shafit of Qui-zi were an existential threat and chosen to follow an order that must have seemed shocking. How many of those choices had led to Dara bowing before Manizheh, standing at her side while she committed genocide?

  I don’t want to think about this. Nahri had made her choice. She wrapped her shivering arms around her knees and squeezed her eyes shut against the tears she refused to let flow, taking refuge in the darkness of her closed lids.

  And then she saw them. Subha in the infirmary they’d rebuilt, forcing a cup of tea on her as Nahri tried to hold herself together for her injured tribesmen. Jamshid laughing in the infirmary on his steed of cushions. The shafit children in the school at the workcamp. The Daeva children grinning at her in the Temple.

  The Geziri children who died with sparklers in their hands. The people who, like Ali had irritatingly pointed out, did not have their choice.

  Nahri swore, loud and profuse enough to startle a pigeon that had been resting in the eaves of the nearest mausoleum. Then she rose to her feet and returned to Yaqub’s, praying she wasn’t too late.

  THEY WERE WAITING FOR HER OUTSIDE THE APOTHECARY. Yaqub was dressed in the shawl he wore on his walks home, visibly fretting as he passed his cane from hand to hand. At his side, Ali was somber, looking even more isolated than usual from the humans passing by.

  Yaqub clucked his tongue as he caught sight of her. “You are terrible for the nerves, do you know that?”

  “I didn’t mean to worry you,” Nahri apologized. “I just … I needed some space to think.” She kept her attention fixed on Yaqub, not unaware of the weight of Ali’s gaze.

  The pharmacist looked unconvinced. “Young women should do their thinking in their homes,” he grumbled, adjusting his shawl. “It is safer.” He nodded at the door. “I left you beans and bread.”

  Nahri let the “young women” comment slide for now. “Thank you, grandfather,” she said simply. “Give my blessings to your family.”

  Ali stepped toward her the moment Yaqub was gone. “Nahri, I’m sorry. You’re right; I had no business—”

  “You’re going to tell me everything,” she cut in. “What the marid did to you, whatever lore and history you’ve been hiding about the war, about the seal—everything, understand? No more secrets.”

  He blinked. “I mean, of course—”

  Nahri held up a hand. “I’m not done. If we’re going to do this, you need to listen to me. We need to be careful. No reckless plans of self-sacrifice and spouting off things that will get us killed. I’m not going near Banu ‘I control people’s limbs with my mind’ until we have a plan that I—not you—believe solid.”

  Ali brightened. “Wait, you’re going to come with me to Ta Ntry? You don’t want to stay in Cairo?”

  “Of course I want to stay in Cairo! And if Daevabad wasn’t in the hands of a murderous Nahid who makes your father’s body count look like child’s play, I would. But it’s like you said,” she explained begrudgingly. “We have people there relying on us.”

  His eyes were shining with pride. God, Nahri wanted to stab him.

  He touched his heart. “It would be my greatest honor to fight at your—”

  Nahri let out an exasperated hiss to shut him up. Better rudeness than letting slip how relieved she was that he hadn’t already left. “No. None of that. I’m not even committing to anything, understand?” she warned, jabbing a finger in Ali’s face. “I haven’t had the greatest experience showing up unexpectedly at magical courts of bickering djinn who warred against my ancestors. If things go to hell in Ta Ntry, I’m gone.”

  The ghost of what might have once been a smile curved his lips. “Then there’s no one I’d rather be abandoned by.” Ali’s expression softened. “And thank you, Nahri. I don’t think I could get through all this without you.”

  She grumbled, fighting the emotions eating at her heart. “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  Now Ali did smile, the first time she’d seen him do so since the attack. “Then what do we do next, as it seems you’re in charge?”

  Nahri nodded at Muntadhir’s khanjar. “We go buy a boat.”

  11

  DARA

  Dara grimaced, wa
tching as the line of young men before him shot arrows into the trees, into the grass, into a distant tent … really, anywhere that wasn’t their target.

  “Are they getting any better?” he finally asked.

  Noshrad, one of his original warriors, looked discouraged. “They have generally started shooting in a forward direction instead of at each other.”

  Dara pinched his brow. “I do not understand. Our people are renowned at the bow. Navasatem was to be occurring. Where are all the Daeva archers who would have competed?”

  “Since your death, the only Daevas permitted to own a bow have been noblemen sworn to the Qahtanis. Kaveh warned me many were the boon companions of Emir Muntadhir and advised we weed them out of potential recruits until things are … less tense.”

  The news that there was a whole group of skilled Daeva archers—the exact kind of people Daevabad needed—unavailable because of their ties to Muntadhir al Qahtani filled Dara with a new desire to strangle the former emir.

  He cracked his knuckles, forcing himself to remain calm. “There must be more Daeva men willing to protect their city.”

  “We’ve already posted everyone with any fighting experience.” Noshrad hesitated. “But we haven’t been as successful with recruitment as we’d hoped. People are too afraid. With magic gone, everyone’s just waiting for the next catastrophe.”

  Waiting for the next catastrophe seemed an entirely too-apt description of their current circumstances. Dara gazed at the field his men had turned into a training yard. With the rest of the city walled off, the Daevas had opened the gate that led from their quarters into the hills, forests, and farms that dominated the rest of the island—a gate and an option no other tribe had. Most of the land was owned by the city’s oldest Daeva families—or at least had been until Manizheh declared everything under her control. The city had been well stocked for Navasatem, but between the huge number of tourists and the fact that no ships or caravans were coming in, it was only a matter of time until food became an issue, so they intended to make sure what had yet to be harvested remained in their hands.